XFS and XEN

[Christoph Hellwig]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 03:00:39PM +0100, Michael Monnerie wrote:
> "Christoph Hellwig" <hch at infradead.org> schrieb:
> > I'm not even sure the Xen driver implements barriers.  I haven't done
> > much with Xen, but with the default kvm/qemu config I can completely
> > wreck ext3 and XFS filesystems.  If using these virtualization solutions
> > make sure you do not cache the virtual block device in the host
> > pagecache, and that in doubt the write cache of the disk is turned off
> > as barriers most likely won't work through the virtualization stack.
> 
> How can I do that?

Barriers are disabled using hdparm.  To make sure qemu/kvm doesn't
cache your image file specify cache=off on the command line specifying
that virtual disk.